Spin State - Chris Moriarty [104]
Bella smiled. “You don’t like to see people hurt,” she said. “You’re softhearted. Just like Hannah was.”
“How well did you know her?” Li asked.
“Only well enough to know she was kind.”
“There was an entry in her datebook a few days before she died, just an initial, B. Did you have an appointment with her that week? Did you meet? Talk about something?”
Bella turned away and wandered around the room, the starlight flickering up through her flowing skirts. As she walked, she ran her fingers lightly over the chairs, the bookshelves, the back of a sofa. Li shuddered, feeling as if it were her own flesh Bella was touching, not dead virusteel and vat-leather.
“Sit down,” Bella said.
Li sat.
Bella ended her wandering in front of the sleek black box of Haas’s streamspace terminal. She looked down at it, her black hair spilling over her shoulders like water running down a coal face. She sprang the catch and opened the terminal, revealing a dense tangle of spintronics wrapped around bright shards of communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.
She slipped a pale finger into the rat’s nest of wires and skimmed it along the condensates. “They’re cold,” she said. “They’re always cold once they’re formatted. Curious. In the mine, they speak to me and no one else. Up here, they speak to everyone . . . and to me they’re just dead stones.”
Li looked at the terminal’s guts and waited to hear whatever Bella was trying to tell her.
“Can you hear them?” Bella asked. “In the mine? Can you?”
“Not really,” Li answered. “They just fry my internals, that’s all.”
“To me they sing. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, hearing them. It’s what I was made for. In a way no human could understand.”
“Is that what you did for Sharifi? Find crystals?”
Instead of answering, Bella bent over the ansible and lifted out one of the clear slivers of condensate. It glittered in the faint light. Bella held it up between them and looked through it, and Li saw the blue-violet shimmer of her eyes refracted through the crystal.
“Do you actually know how they work?” Bella asked.
Li shrugged. “I learned what I needed to pass my commissioning test. Beyond that . . . well, who knows how they really work?”
Bella looked away, her eyes shadowed by the dark fall of hair. “Hannah knew. She knew everything about them.”
“Bella,” Li said, speaking quietly, “what was Sharifi doing in the mine the day she died?”
“Working.”
“No. She went down there to meet someone. Who was it?”
Bella reached into the tangle of chips and wires to replace the crystal. “If I remembered,” she said at last, “don’t you think I’d tell you?” But her face was turned away from Li, into darkness.
“I’m trying to catch the person who killed her, Bella. I need your help. I need any help I can get.”
Bella looked at Li for a moment without speaking, then came across the room, knelt in front of her chair between her feet, and laid her pale smooth hands on Li’s thighs. “I want to help,” she whispered. “You have to believe me. I’d do anything to help you.”
Bella’s hands were hot, even through the thick fabric of Li’s uniform. She knew she should put some distance between them, but leaning back into the deep chair seemed too much like an invitation.
And Bella wasn’t looking for that. She was looking for help. For someone to stand up for her, to be the friend Sharifi seemed to have been. She wasn’t looking for Li to get in line behind Haas and who knew how many others to take advantage of her. And the mere fact that she seemed to think she had to offer it made Li sick.
She took Bella’s hands in hers. She put them away from her. She extricated herself from the chair and stepped around the kneeling woman. Bella made no move to stop her.
“Have you ever met Andrej Korchow?” Li asked when she’d gotten far enough away to think straight.
Something snapped closed behind Bella’s eyes. “Who?”
“Korchow.”
“No. Why?”
“I think he was paying Sharifi for information about her project.”
“No!” Bella